Scholarship Reconsidered

Ernest Boyer states that the role of the professor can no longer be thought of as silos of activity, including teaching, service, research, and professional development. Instead, we need to imagine ourselves as intersectional academics where the scholarship of teaching, application, integration, and discovery overlap and inform each other. Similar to how as a Black Woman Engineering Professor, all of my identities intersect to bring my whole self to everything I do as opposed to trying to separate them into certain components for certain tasks. See Figure 1 for an illustration of this theory.

Scholarship of teaching is used to educate and entice students to want to conduct further study or research to transmit, transform, and extend knowledge that they learn in class. Scholarship of application is when the research or professional development is applied to consequential problems or service to improve the world, typically these would be applications of the theory to real world problems that students observed in class. Scholarship of integration is used to make connections between disciplines such as how robotics is inherently multidisciplinary and illustrates how various disciplines can work together.

As an engineering and robotics professor, the way that I illustarated the scholarship reconsidered in my work is to use robotics for my service to the community to bring more diverse populations to engineering and bring engineering to more diverse populations. In my teaching, I illustrate multidisciplinary connections and also real world applications of controls, programming, artificial intelligence, electronics and sensings. I do this by using integral laboratory experiments, projects, and coding projects with a required software design plan. In my research, I recruit the undergraduate students from my robotics course to apply what they’ve learned to real-world problems and applications in the context of human-robot interaction, engineering education, robotics, education, and human-robot interfaces. See Figure 2 for an illustration of this concept..

This new vision for scholarship aligns well with this vision for an open source hardware trailblazer fellow. This is because it provides a new way to do research and professional development. It requires thinking of your work in terms of a holistic perspective that impacts all relevant stakeholders immediately.  Open source means it is publicly available to study, modify, distribute, make, and sell your designs or hardware as soon as all materials are available online. This helps to get your work to the community quicker. Through the access by more hands and eyes, there can be design improvements or corrections sooner which will improve the artifact as was as the impact. It will also expand the number of members of the community who will engage with and benefit from your work. There is a very real possibility that some of these individuals would have never seen this product if it was not open source.

Open source hardware allows you to make an impact much quicker than waiting for a patent, journal paper acceptance or conference presentation. This also keeps academics from singing to the choir by engaging new perspectives and audiences. This method also gives you the freedom to control your technology and share your knowledge or encourage commerce through the free and open exchange of designs. It recreates a wonderful way for academics to engage in all the elements of a professorship: service, teaching, research, professional development without having to envision them as a siloed approach where you must be concerned with being first to publish, present, patent.

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8/7/22 Video Blog: Scholarship Reconsidered